President Obama at his press conference at the White House on Tuesday. credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

President Obama failed to hide his frustrations over attacks on his budget decisions in a press conference on Tuesday, calling for patience as he tries to tackle long-term deficits and appealing to Republicans to join him in an "adult conversation" to resolve their difference on spending and forestall a crisis on entitlements.
On almost every domestic issue raised by reporters, the president was under assault, complaining at one point that Washington is too "impatient" and admitting at another point to being frustrated.
Obama seemed far more confident in dealing with foreign policy questions. Repeatedly, he easily deflected challenges to his handling of the revolution in Egypt. "We got it about right," he declared. And, "We were on the right side of history." He encouraged an orderly transition to democracy and warned against a "chaotic" process.

He spoke firmly and confidently about the ramifications for the rest of the Middle East, balancing the goal of stability in the region with American championing of human rights.
It was much harder for the president to find the balance between cuts and spending on the budget he released on Monday, and the balance between his own party's demand for social spending and the opposition party's cries for deeper cuts. It was a choice he cast as between a scalpel and a machete.
The key line of the press conference may have been his appeal for an "adult conversation" on spending and entitlements. It reflected White House interest in comments made the day before by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who promised that the Republican budget put forth in the House would tackle entitlement reform. For his part, Obama said that his budget had deliberately sidestepped those questions so they could be dealt with in a bipartisan manner from the start.
The White House was intrigued by Cantor's statement as a sign of Republican willingness to go beyond a narrow focus on spending cuts. But reading GOP intent was complicated by later comments by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who seemed less committed to the inclusion of entitlement reform in the budget.
The president used the press conference to try to send his own signal that he is ready to work with Cantor, saying he was "glad" to see the Virginia Republican's remarks. "I think that's progress, because what we had been hearing made it sound as if we just slashed deeper on education or, you know, other provisions in domestic spending that somehow that alone was going to solve the problem," he said. "So I welcomed -- I thought it was significant progress that there is an interest on all sides on those issues."
The president left no doubt in his press conference, though, that he intends to be extraordinarily cautious in entering that entitlement fray and seemed quite content to put it off for a future day. There will not be, as he said, "an Obama plan."
"If you look at the history of how these deals get done, typically, it is not because there is an Obama plan out there," he said. "It is because Democrats and Republicans are both committed to tackling this issue in a serious way."
Pressed on why he was not doing more, he complained, "You guys are pretty impatient. If something doesn't happen today, the assumption is that it isn't going to happen." He then noted that the Egyptian ouster of Hosni Mubarak took some time to play out.
He was also clearly on the defensive when pressed on the cuts he has called for in Pell Grants, community service grants and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a cut first unearthed by National Journal. He tried to have it both ways, boasting that he had earlier increased spending on Pell Grants and LIHEAP. But now, he said, "We're in a budget crunch" and cuts are justified even if they do hurt some people.
The question and the press conference nicely captured the political dilemma Obama finds himself in as he was whipsawed between accusations that he was ignoring the deficit and complaints that he is proposing cuts that will hurt common people.
The usually explanatory--some would jibe, professorial--president even tried to signal that he understands that he hurt right along with Americans in this difficult economy. "I definitely feel folks' pain," he protested, adding, that when he reads the 10 letters his staff selects for him each day from Americans who are suffering he feels like a "case worker."
"Sometimes I'm also just frustrated by the number of people out there who are struggling and you want to help every single one individually," Obama said.
For a Democratic president it is never a good sign politically to have to insist that you have empathy.
Thumbnail image credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

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But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

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Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

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Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

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